Are modern humans ‘domesticated’?

While animals, especially dogs, underwent domestication the deliberate or unconscious human choice of favoured physiological and behavioural traits produced distinct differences between the ancestral species and the ‘breeds’ with which we are now familiar. In general domestication has resulted in dogs with reduced jaws and flatter faces, lower aggression, especially in the case of males, and reduced stressfulness in the company of humans and other tame dogs compared with their wolf ancestors. It is widely accepted that cats have ‘tamed themselves’ through the adoption of lifestyles associated with the benefits of close association with human communities, which have resulted in similar adaptations to those in more deliberately domesticated dogs. It is beginning to dawn on anthropologists that human social evolution may unwittingly have affected the course of our own evolution. Tighter social bonding among growing sizes of communities as brain capacity increased and the behavioural and cognitive attributes needed for that have been summarised recently by a group associated with the Social Brain hypothesis of Robin Dunbar of Oxford University, UK (Gamble, C., Gowlett, J. & Dunbar, R.I.M. 2014. Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. ISBN-13: 978-0500051801;Thames and Hudson: London).

It was Charles Darwin who first speculated that ‘Man in many respects may be compared with those animals which have long been domesticated’. But to what extent does the hominin fossil record support such a view? Collaborators from Duke University and the University of Iowa, USA, have set out to analyse physiological changes over the last 200 ka that may be explained in this way (Cieri, R.L. et al. 2014. Craniofacial feminization,social tolerance and the origins of behavioural modernity. Current Anthropology, v. 55, p. 419-443. Includes discussion and responses). They used the degree of projection of brow ridges, facial shape and cranial volume from 3 groups of Homo sapiens remains: skulls older than 80 ka (13 specimens); spanning 38 to 80 ka (41) and from recent humans (1367). They found that brow ridges shrank significantly over the last 80 thousand years, faces shortened and cranial capacity decreased, especially among males. This resulted in a convergence in appearance between males and females, which the authors attributed to general lowering of testosterone and stress hormone levels through selection for greater social tolerance: akin to similar physiognomic changes in domesticated dogs which DNA analyses have shown to be been linked with modification of genes associated with aggression regulation. The finding among dogs suggests that their domestication is accomplished by slower development; i.e. young animals are naturally less fearful and have a greater tendency to taming. This delayed development from foetus to adulthood, with retention in mature individuals of juvenile characteristics, is known as neoteny, and affects all manner of adult characteristics, including coloration, snout length and the adrenal glands: as adult dogs now more resemble wolf pups, so human adults are more like young chimps than elders. At a conference where Cieri et al.’s results were presented, it was observed that hunter gatherer bands are intolerant, to the point of capital punishment, of wife stealers, murderers and seriously dishonest men, whereas such reactions fall off significantly among members of larger social groups involved in agriculture and urban life. Such modern behavioural patterns tally with brow ridge, face length and cranial capacity, perhaps linked with selection for personalities more attuned to cooperation.

Comparison of Neanderthal and Modern human skulls from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (credit: Wikipedia)

Although earlier human species, such as H. neanderthalensis, heidelbergensis and erectus had significantly different skull anatomy, each had prominent brow ridges that, on this account, may signify both greater exposure to testosterone and less social tolerance, and smaller group sizes. But, so far, analysis of the Neanderthal genome has not led to publication of any comments about testosterone or stress-hormone related genes. However, a clear strand of discussion is developing around evidence rather than mere speculation about psychological/cognitive aspects of human evolution that challenges the old-style ‘what-you-see-is-what-there-was’ (WYSWTW) archaeological dogma: a dialectic of social and biological relationships.

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